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Where I'm Going to Be Next

For a host of reasons, I do try to limit my travel. But I also do give talks, and I do do interviews, and this corner of the blog will tell you what's upcoming. If you'd like me to come speak, send me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com, and we'll see if we can work things out.

My Next Talk:

On February 16 at 3pm, I'm giving a FREE talk on the basics of food storage - why and how - at my friend Joy's store, The Olde Corner Store 133 Factory, Gallupville NY 12073. 518-872-1610. All are welcome, and Joy will be offering a discount to anyone who wants to get started in storing bulk foods.

About the Books

In case you wondered, there are two of them.

Coming out in the fall of this year, _Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front_ focuses on how families can adapt to a lower energy, hotter world - and help hold back the worst of the disaster as well.

Coming in Spring '09, _A Nation of Farmers_ co-authored with Aaron Newton explores our current agricultural situation, makes a case for a sustainable future, and draws the connections between our agriculture and our lost democracy.

Both forthcoming from New Society Publishers.

About Me

I'm a 35 year old writer and subsistence farmer, author of two forthcoming books on Peak Oil and Climate Change _Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front_ (Fall '08) and _A Nation of Farmers (And Cooks)_ (Spring '09) the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton. Both books are forthcoming from New Society Publishers.
I used to run a small, Jewish themed CSA, but now we're concentrating on subsistence agriculture, growing food and teaching others to grow food.
My training was in literature, focusing on the Renaissance and demographic and cultural crises of the 17th century. I've switched to focusing on the demographic and cultural crises of the 21st century for the moment, but retain an interest in all things literary.
In my spare time (of which there isn't much), my husband Eric and I are raising Eli (7 1/2), Simon (6), Isaiah (4) and Asher (2), and assorted critters and livestock, building an agrarian future.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Why Is this Apocalypse Different than All Other Apocalypses: Making the Case for Peak Oil and Climate Change Now

A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don’t necessarily agree on this subject, or they don’t see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they are struggling to grasp the implications. So sometimes, we need to back up, and make the case for something that is always new to some people. The truth is that if my writing is to be anything other than preaching to the converted, we have to answer the skeptics.

That’s why I was so delighted when I got an email from Frazzlehead who asked me why this particular energy crisis was different than the one of the 1970s. She observed that she’d been reading 1970s back to the land texts, and finding the exact same narrative in them – that we’re running out of oil, that soon the economy will crash and we’ll need to go back to farming. Why, she asked, is it right this time?

“I look at the date it was written and think, see? They’ve been saying this for ages – and it hasn’t happened. Still, something in my gut tells me that it’s different this time, that this isn’t just a robot waving it’s silly arms saying “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Danger!” … that something really is wrong and things will change dramatically.What I can’t quite put my finger on is the evidence for *this* time being the *real* time.Is the Boy just crying wolf again? Or is there really a wolf?Can you help me see why *this time* it is for real?”

This is an extremely important question – the fact is, ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when we recognized we really can have “World” wars, since the advent of the military capacity to destroy the lives of billions, since we recognized our impact on the earth, we’ve been afraid we’d destroy it. How do we know that this time, we really are?

And of course, this is a good question for climate change as well. Because, there’s a small grain of truth in the oft-repeated claim that in the 1970s, climate scientists were predicting an ice age – only a small one but still. The fact is, many people remember these predictions of the end of everything, and remember Y2K as well, and then think “the evidence is against those who say things are going to change.” This is a reasonable critique, and one that requires a good answer – or a series of them. That is, it isn’t enough to say “Well, this time we’re right.”

The reason we want multiple answers here is that there are several questions. The first one is this “What are the differences between the scientific and technical cases for peak oil now, and climate change now, vs. then.” But that’s only part of the answer. Because most of us aren’t climate scientists or petroleum geologists, and we’re not going to read every single bit of information on this subject, so to some degree, we have to rely on our own analysis. We can weigh the credibility of the technical analyses to one degree or another, but we also need grounds for distinguishing between those analyses.

The ideal grounds would be that we completely understand everything the scientists are saying, but since that’s not true, we need another set of analytic tools.

So the next question we have to answer is this – what present day evidence do we have for each case? How can I see this with my own eyes? And how do the various available accounts I’m being offered match up with both the scientific evidence and the evidence of my eyes? That is, both the “disasters are coming” and the “it’ll never happen” crowds are telling stories – they are giving an account of the past and the future. Picking the right story depends on our being able to match up evidence with the narrative being provided to us.

And while those two data points are convincing, they aren’t everything we need to know to make a decision – we also need to ask ourselves how to apply an imperfect case for something. That is, assuming that very few things about the future can be known with absolute certainty, we need to know what the case for action is – that is, how should we use the information above? What tools of analysis will get us the best results?

I’m going to go through these questions, one at a time, to the best of my ability. Because the subject is such a long one, this will appear in two parts.

First, the technical analysis:

First of all, what was the evidence for 1970s style depletion analyses? I’m going to admit here that I am somewhat handicapped on this question by having been born during the 1970s oil crisis – that is, I have no direct experience of the data that was coming in during that period – I was busy analyzing the comparative merits of growing up to be a garbage collector (cool truck) or a vet (cool puppies and kittens), and thus not paying much (any) attention to petroleum geology.

I’ve done no real research into the accounts coming in during that period, either. So I honestly can’t personally tell you how good the 1970s accounts actually were. That is, I haven’t seen them. I’ve seen the same accounts Frazzlehead has, popular narratives in which we were “running out of oil” but not any scholarly accounts that make that same claim. This is not to say that there weren’t any, just that I’m unfamiliar with them.

In fact, peak oil theory doesn’t make the claim that “we’re running out of oil” either, except in the sense that whenever you make any use of a non-renewable resource, you are reducing the amount that’s left and contributing to the larger process of “running out.” The peak of oil production occurs at the moment that we have used ½ of the oil in the ground. No peak oil scholar that I’ve ever seen has suggested that we are in immanent danger of having the world run out, but rather that demand (how much oil we’d like to burn) will exceed supply (the amount we can get out of the ground). Some consequences under the current systm of this difference between demand and supply would be higher prices, spot shortages, poor people being priced out of the market altogether, and gradually more and more people being priced out or having their usage dramatically reduced. But that’s not the same as actually running out.

It is safe to say that if people in the 1970s were claiming that we were in immanent danger of running out, they were really, really deeply mistaken – and that that mistake can’t be chalked up to improvements in science. But I suspect that most scholars weren’t saying that – instead, they were saying something more complicated and nuanced, and, as is often the case, complicated, nuanced ideas got dumbed down to something less accurate but more exciting sounding.

To get some evidence of this, let’s look at _The Limits to Growth_ which was perhaps the single most famous text that said we were “running out of oil” in the 1970s. But, of course, that’s not what it said at all. I’m going to quote here Richard Heinberg’s analysis of TLTG, because I think he covers all the salient points:

“Several economists have attempted to debunk the conclusions presented in LTG. For example, in _Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse_, Ronald Bailey wrote that “In 1972 The Limits to Growth predicted that at exponential growth rates, the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993.” _Facts Not Fears: A Parents Guide to Teaching Kids about the Environment_ by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw repeated part of this list and pointed out that “The world did not run out of gold by 1981, or zinc by 1990, or petroleum by 1992, as the book predicted.”

However, these were not predictions contained in the book. The reference for these claim is Table 4…The table lists three sets of numbers: a static reserve index (how long known reserves would last at 1972 rates of consumption); an exponential reserve index (how long known reserves would last at an exponentially increasing rate of consumption); and an expontential index calculated using five times the known reserves (that is, assuming substantial new discoveries of the resources in question). Criticisms of LTG focused only on the second, ‘exponential reserve’ set of numbers which was the most pessimistic, even though the authors clearly stated that this did not constitute a prediction, but merely a statistical extrapolation.” (Powerdown, 93-94)

That is, critiques of _The Limits To Growth_ were made out of context. The authors knew that it was very, very unlikely that we would have massive growth of consumption without any new discoveries, and weren’t proposing that would happen – they were providing context for their larger conclusion that we are at risk of overshoot.

In fact, _The Limits To Growth_ was probably fairly accurate in their overall claims, as the updates have demonstrated.It is important to note that TLTG made the claim, to the extent it claimed things, rather than observed them, that collapse was likely to come not in the 1970s, but at the very end of the 20th or beginning of the 21st century.

That is, they claimed that *overshoot* - the point at which we were exceeding the capacity of the earth to sustain us would happen earlier than that – and in fact, there’s compelling evidence they were right. But they never claimed that the crisis point would be reached at the same moment we reached overshoot – instead, they suggested otherwise. This is an important distinction. That is, TLTG emphasized how urgent it was that we begin to make policy and practical changes that would abate the crisis in the 1970s – that was the time to respond. But those policy changes were designed to avoid an outcome that would occur decades later – and they are occurring decades later as predicted.

Richard Heinberg has actually claimed that he hasn’t been able to find a single example of any peer reviewed paper predicting we were actually going to run out of oil in the 1970s – and yet, many people “knew” that this was the case. I don’t know if that fact is still true – even if there are some, that doesn’t mean they were right. But there certainly aren’t a large number of them.

What was true in the 1970s, is that *American* oil prediction hit its peak. In 1970, American production peaked, just as M.King Hubbard said it would. At the time, nearly everyone denied that Hubbard was right – after all, we’d just produced more oil than we ever had before – why would we expect shortfalls? Well, the reality is that that’s just how it works – the peak is the point at which you produce more than you ever have – or ever will again. So America actually was experiencing serious oil shortfalls, and because of the OPEC embargo, was unable to meet demand.

Looking through my collection of older back-to-the-land accounts, I see several of them claim that we can’t depend on foreign oil. And that may be at the root of our belief that we thought we were running out in the 1970s – we believed that America would largely have to rely on its own oil supplies, which were patently inadequate to meet even 1970s demand. In that sense, we were “running out of oil” because we had ample evidence that we might not always be able to buy it, and our supply was inadequate. That politics changed, and the bottom dropped out of the oil price, giving OPEC incentives to keep our supply coming was a great result – but if the embargo had continued, we might genuinely have been “running out” that is, supplies of oil aren’t just absolute, but the ones you have access to.

That’s an important point on peak oil – because access has as much effect as absolute reserves. So, for example, an oil crisis could arise because of our inability to increase imports, or because of structural failures in refining capacity that cause shortages before the absolute peak, or because of geopolitical issues. On the one hand, peak oil is a very simple idea. On the other, if you interpret the term to mean “the point at which supply can no longer meet demand” it gets very complicated. For example, many poor nations can no longer afford to import oil at all, and are suffering because of that. For them, peak oil is already a reality.

In fact, the 1970s oil shocks offer a useful kind of support for the claims of peak oil in the present. The oil shocks were fundamentally political in nature, but they also offer proof of the fact that a. there are peaks, and b. such peaks are inherently disruptive. The reduction in available oil in the US after its peak left us in a tough spot, politically speaking, and vulnerable to supply constraints caused by outside forces. Several peak oil scholars have correlated regional peaks with periods of societal disruption – that is, when we experience substantial declines in resource access, it causes major problems.

The same argument can be made about the frequently quoted claim that in the 1970s, scientists were predicting an ice age, and now they are predicting catastrophic warming. In fact, in the 1970s, there was some discussion of the possibility of a new ice age, for several reasons. The first is that in the 1970s, particulate emissions, that is, pollution, was so severe that it caused a considerable cooling of the planet. So it seemed possible that we were entering a cooling cycle.

We were also statistically at the end of a period of climate stability, and the possibility that there might be an ice age was discussed. But even Richard Lindzen, one of the formest Global Warming skeptics, has admitted that this was never more than the equivalent of scientists batting an idea around. That is, there never was any strong scientific consensus that we were entering into a period of global cooling *and* most research on this subject was speaking only of natural cycles.

For example, perhaps the most famous article on this subject appeared in Science in 1976, and included the phrase “in the absence of human perturbation of the climate.” That is, the prediction that global cooling would occur was *explicitly* made with the caveat that if we mess with the climate this probably won’t happen. But, as usual, the nuance was removed, and what we get is the idea that we once were really sure we were going to have global cooling.

It is also very important to note that scientists *also* were predicting Global Warming well before the 1970s. A Swedish chemist named Arrhenius discovered and predicted global warming at the turn of the last century, documenting that it was already underway. Charles Keeling was doing work on Global Warming in the 1950s and 60s, and continued to do this work until his death in 2005. In 1979, as Jimmy Carter's Global 2000 report was being compiled, anthropogenic global warming was cited as one of the most serious problems of the century. So it would be more accurate to say that in the 1970s, there was considerable debate over whether warming or cooling would be the primary concern, and by the end of that decade, there was a growing consensus that global warming was far more likely.

In both cases, one of the most important bits of evidence is the degree of scientific consensus – that is, the sheer number of scholars and researchers that agree that they are seeing evidence of something. Since these scientists will generally come at this issue from different directions – one person studying ice melt in the arctic, another sea level rises, one petroleum geologist studying future projections, another talking about the history of discovery. So while hardly infalliable, scientific consensus matters.

And in both cases, we can claim that there is an enormous difference between scientific consensus now and scientific consensus then. For example, consensus on global warming is overwhelming. The oft-stated claim that there are no peer-reviewed scholarly articles that cast real doubt on the anthropogenic (human caused) nature of climate change is probably not quite true, but there are very few of them - a handful at best, mostly in minor journals, and compared to 10,000 and more such articles in peer reviewed scholarly journals that take the other position. There are a few real scholars (and a bunch of paid shills for the energy industry) who sincerely believe that climate change is not anthropogenic (there’s no one who doesn’t believe the climate is changing, btw), but the reality is that there are tiny, dissenting minorities on every scholarly community. It is still possible, for example, to find a few doctors who don’t believe cigarettes cause cancer. It is still possible to find some historians who don’t think the Holocaust ever happened. But these are few, and they don’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority believe otherwise, and, more importantly, that the overwhelming majority of the evidence supports anthropogenic global warming.

In regards to peak oil, the scientific consensus is actually harder to figure out. Every once in a while I run into someone who is a peak oil believer and a global warming skeptic, which I find quite funny. That is, the scientific evidence for global warming is so much greater than for peak oil (which in no means implies that both are not true, merely that there is less certainty and less research in regards to peak oil) that it seems odd to me that one could evaluate the evidence for the less certain one, agree with it, and then dismiss the evidence for the other.

But saying that there’s more controversy in the study of peak oil that climate change is not to say that there is no scientific consensus on peak oil. In 2007, the General Accounting Office of the US Congress released a report that argued that a majority of relevant scholars and oil experts now believe that a peak has already happened or is immanent. There are still significant dissenting viewpoints – notably Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), but both are showing chinks in their armor as oil prices rise and as we get several years away from what seems to be our production peak, in 2005. The IEA, for example, this year admitted they anticipate supply constraints into the 2040s – which is effectively an acknowledgement of peak oil, since virtually no serious assessments put the peak that late – the US Geological Survey, for example, puts the world peak at 2023.

The truth is that it is very hard to predict an oil peak, except in hindsight. At the 2006 ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil) conference, I heard peak oil researchers give dates that ranged from 2012 or later to 2005 – so even the experts who do believe in peak oil are uncertain. Because there is no reliable reserve data on total available oil, we can only look at the history of our discoveries (that is, discoveries peaked in the 1960s – since then we’ve been finding a dramatically decreasing amount of new oil each year, despite all the people who hype each new discovery as the answer), how much of the globe has been mapped for oil (the vast majority) and estimate likelihoods. And also, we can do the math showing current rates of decline (most of the major producers are declining significantly), and look at how much oil we’d need to find in order to put off the problem. The answer is “a hell of a lot” – that is, as Matthew Simmons put it, even if we found a massive oil field, as big as the North Sea, for example, it would only delay the whole world’s oil peak by a matter of months.

The next question would be how well the predictions, model and data match up with what we’re actually seeing right now. For example, in regards to peak oil, while we don’t know whether or not the Saudi giant oil fields have actually peaked, we can look and see what is actually happening in the world. Some Saudi authorities claim that the peak is a long way out, others that it is very near (many oil company executives now openly admit peak oil). But right now, oil prices are at very nearly the world record. When prices are extremely high (and they have been for several years now), generally speaking the laws of economics would suggest that people have the incentive to make as much money as they can, by producing as much of this high priced stuff as possible. In fact, however, the Saudis have made “voluntary” cuts now several years in a row. It is possible that OPEC and the House of Saud has said, “We’re rich enough – we simply don’t want any more money.” But how likely is that? More credible is the idea that they cannot increase production due to physical constraints.

The fact is that overall, world oil production is either stagnating or falling in most areas. Explaining this fact requires a credible reasoning. Market forces certainly aren’t driving the decline – anyone with oil has an incentive to sell it now. In some cases, there are technical problems with extraction, or other limits that can explain this, but these explanations are insufficient to describe the overarching trend. On the other hand, peak oil theory explains it in two ways. The first is that actual output has plateued or is beginning to decline. The second is that if we know that, more nations will withhold some of their oil for the longer term, both for their own use, and to sell later on. If we have plenty of oil, it would be crazy of producers not to take advantage of record high prices. If we don’t, we can assume that in fact, high prices will continue, and even rise higher. Peak oil theory fits the facts.

The same is true with climate change theory. For example, climate change dissenters often argue that the sun is sending more heat our way. But if that were true, we’d be seeing more warming in the upper atmosphere as well as closer to the earth. But in fact, the opposite is true – the upper atmosphere is cooler. Since the sun’s rays have to go through the upper atmosphere to get to the earth, that’s not consistent. But if the earth itself is trapping carbon and increasing heat, it would make sense that we would find the upper atmosphere cooler than the lower.

The correlation of manmade C02 levels with planetary warming is another place we can see the evidence of global warming. The ice reductions in the arctic, and the thinning of the edges of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are another.

That is not to say that there is no inconsistency in climate systems – we are talking about a large, enormously complex system, being modeled by thousands of researchers. It is not an easy thing to figure out, and not every bit of data is going to be perfect. But the overwhelming reality is that the story here fits the data extremely well – the account of anthropogenic global warming fits what we are seeing – if anything, we have tended to underestimate our impact.

We can also see the evidence of our own eyes in both cases - we can see the rise in food prices, gas prices, the warming of our regions, the changes in planting zones and snowfall, the increased frequence of drought. These are not sufficient evidence - any one year, any one locality can be explained. But there is no doubt that billions of people around the world are seeing these things, and that our vision is a small piece of the picture.

Going back, for a moment, to _The Limits to Growth_, one of the things that appears a lot in later modeling, in, for example, the 30 Year Update of TLTG, is that feedback loops and intersections are a bigger problem than any individual problem. And for those people wondering whether these problems are really as bad as they think they are, this is probably the most important thing to know – in the 1970s, we were worried about individual problems – a shortage of oil, for example, or about pollution, or a coming ice age. Right now, the biggest concern we have is of the intersection of inter-related problems. That is, the problem is not our ability to respond to one problem, but our ability to respond to multiple, overwhelming simultaneous crises.

_The Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update_ found that almost all its “business as usual” scenarios led to collapse , *EVEN IF* the sheer quantities of resources available were *DOUBLED* over what we have any evidence at all for – that is, even if we had enough energy to go along, pollution built and cancer rates skyrocketed, while soil erosion rose to make food production fail to keep pace with population growth. That is, these scenarios don’t depend on a shortage or crisis in any single place – they operate as a system of feedback loops influencing one another. As the authors put it,

A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope." (TLG30, 223)

In the 1970s, environmental activists were responding to the very first warning signs of depletion and climate change. Many of them interpreted scientific warnings on these points to mean that we were facing an immediate, definite crisis down to the particulars. But that’s not what they were being told. Instead, people were being warned about the longer term consequences of their actions in no uncertain terms. And in fact, our ability to cope managed to push these issues off, in many cases for decades, but again, as we put our limits further off, we drew our resources down further. Soon, the bill comes due.

Now this is all a fairly compelling case, but it isn’t all the truth that ever was, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. That is, there is absolutely no point in exaggerating scientific evidence to pretend we know everything with perfect, utter certainty. So my next post will be about the question of how we use this data – that is, if we think the odds are strongly in favor of something, but we don’t have perfect certainty, how do we know what to do? There are logical tools for that, and my next post on this subject will discuss them.

215 comments:

Thank you, Sharon, for this post. I am a frequent reader of your blog, and I've even referred others to it but I remain skeptical of the seeming "dramatics" of your writing. (Please don't take offense at that. I don't mean to offend. I know how incredibly intelligent and well-read you are--that's why I read your blog after all.) This isn't to say I don't believe climate change is happening nor do I believe that peak oil isn't a possibility, and that our world (by this I mean here in cushy America) isn't going to change big time. Worlds change. Crises happen. Usually, seemingly very quickly because most of us don't like to heed the warnings before the catastrophe.

Our life is already changing. My husband's teaching salary is down because health insurance costs are so much up. Costs everywhere are up. I now have to work as well just to pay our bills, at least for a while until we can either pay off said bills or adjust things so we don't have so many of them. This is happening to just about everyone I know. But I don't like to dwell on the negative, I really don't. We're making due. The economic downturn in America could be good for the planet in the long run, hard as it is to make adjustments. Hopefully, if we're making adjustments as you suggest now the bigger ones will seem less painful.

You needed to write this post for people like me. I now have new ways to frame my thinking on these topics. Thanks!

I appreciate this especially needed post, Sharon. So many people, including my generation (56 yrs. old), remain skeptical about the coming "terminal" triangle of climate change, peak oil and economic meltdown. Should I add the possibility of nuclear holocaust? :) Many do claim that they've heard it all before and choose not to diligently examine the overwhelming scientific consensus this time around. Or is their non-chalant attitude an excuse to continue decadent lifestyles?

I remember reading for a college class in the early 70s "The Limits to Growth" and "The Population Bomb." Later on, I read "Small is Beautiful" and Scott and Helen Nearing's "The Good Life."

Since 1969 when I started college and became more educated on themes facing our times, I have sensed an urgency to pursue lifestyle changes or our civilization will be confronted with imminent catastrophies.

Some of my friends returned to the land. I have a friend who lives in Maine with a minimal income. After attending Bates College, she settled there, homeschooled her children and has farmed organically since then. She is an exception to the rule though. Most people my generation were radical while in college and then the world lured them into a yuppie or bourgeois lifestyle. They soon forgot about the environment, pacifism and the hungry people in the world. Power and greed are too powerful for the human psyche to handle. In fact, most spiritual leaders -- ministers, rabbis, priests -- in our society function as middle class shepherds over middle class sheep as a Franciscan monk once said.

Most in my generation did nothing. Hence, now we are starting to reap the dire consequences of having done nothing.

Yes, in 1970 we knew what was coming. We just did not have available the overwhelming scientific evidence that exists today. Will all this evidence make a difference and translate into individual and collective lifestyle changes? This is the big question.

Sharon, thanks for this really great question and answer. I'm a fan of your blog, and this issue is critical for a lot of boomers to understand, since they have already been there and done that once already with oil shortages. Their previous experience has led them to believe that oil shortages are and will always be cyclical. The boomers have basically been let off the hook once, and feel that they now have a free pass for infinite growth. It is critical for our leaders to understand this point.

This paragraph of yours is the key.

"Looking through my collection of older back-to-the-land accounts, I see several of them claim that we can’t depend on foreign oil. And that may be at the root of our belief that we thought we were running out in the 1970s – we believed that America would largely have to rely on its own oil supplies, which were patently inadequate to meet even 1970s demand. In that sense, we were “running out of oil” because we had ample evidence that we might not always be able to buy it, and our supply was inadequate. That politics changed, and the bottom dropped out of the oil price, giving OPEC incentives to keep our supply coming was a great result – but if the embargo had continued, we might genuinely have been “running out” that is, supplies of oil aren’t just absolute, but the ones you have access to."

If I can reiterate, the reason that it's different this time around is that in the 1970s, the oil shortage was caused by political reshuffling that occurred in the wake of the US's oil peak in 1970. People did not understand then that even though we had peaked, we'd still be able to acquire oil from other countries. Unfortunately that oil acquisition and the imbalances and debt it then created basically trashed our economy through a series of inflationary economic bubbles. Globalization is a nice euphemism for the US sucking up everyone else's oil and other natural resources.

So it's different this time around, because now the world has peaked, and there's no one else to go get the oil from. The 1970s was a nice fire drill for the real oil peak that we are now going to experience.

I was a student in the late 1970s and remember wondering how people could believe that life could go on the way that we were living it. But somehow it did, and I was lulled into a sense of false security along with everyone else, and even wondered if my instincts had been mistaken. Now, whenever I mention Peak Oil, someone will say dismissively, "Oh yes, you think the oil's running out, don't you?" I've tried explaining that that isn't actually what I'm saying, but there's none so deaf as those who don't want to hear. And of course, to them, the oil "running out" means Climate Change won't be a problem either! So they can safely ignore anything I say... Sometimes I have an inkling of how Cassandra must have felt, so thank you for validating my experience. I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas on how to deal with it!

George Monbiot, an "expert" on climate change, comes to mind as one who questions peak oil.

Monbiot and Noam Chomsky (authors whose work I read and admire), along with other progressives, are very critical of 9/11 truth seekers as well. Kind of absurd... They fail to see the interconnectedness of all these issues.

Some background on what people were thinking in the 70s... I was a college student then and in the midst of it. There were intellectuals and scholars writing (Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Barry Commoner, etc.), but that period was not characterized by calm logical thought. We were feeling and doing. The demographic bulge of baby boomers had hit the campuses; our hormonal levels were high and we were primed for big changes, right away. Many people throughout society made dramatic changes in their lives. Debutantes became Marxist-Leninists. Professors joined communes. Let's take to the streets!

Nowadays things are much calmer and the level of awareness is much higher. The values of ecology, feminism and civil rights have become an integral part of people's consciousness - there's disagreement and resistance, but the issues are known. Back in the 60s, awareness of these things all came as violent shocks.

Thus it's hard to compare awareness of energy issues between now and then. The idea of "peak oil" was probably mentioned somewhere, but it certainly wasn't prominent.

Important stuff-so many misconceptions out there. It's funny because I have been able to obtain some old books from the 70's- and they could have been written now- they talk of oil shortages and not relying on foreign oil, etc. I can see how some people think yeah, right- you said this in the 70's and we still haven't run out yet....

Also- this is kind of funny- but when I was a little kid-I too wanted to become a garbage collector for some odd reason(maybe it WAS the truck!)-and then I wanted to be a vet!

I love your rhetorical style Sharon. The structure to your argument is very clear and understandable. No small feat with such difficult material. You do a wonderful job of addressing scientific consensus and even use some examples of consilience across scientific disciplines. I want to add one clarification, if I may though. Some may misconstrue scientific consensus as group think. One could try to argue that just because there is a consensus among individuals about the “truth’ of something (say the necessity and right to own slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries) does not mean that it is “true”. The above example though is not representative of scientific consensus. Scientists strive to model natural phenomena (climates, natural resources etc.). However, rather than seeking to confirm their models, they seek to disconfirm (knock them down). If they are unable to do so, they have more confidence in their ability to make predictions (sea level changes, supply and demand distributions etc.) using their models. When there is consensus across disparate fields of science of a particular broad model (e.g. climate change) it is after thousands of testable hypotheses and supporting models have not been disconfirmed.

Thank you so very much for the clear, patient explanation of the details: it's exactly the kind of answer I hoped I could find!

As an added benefit, I now have a "Peak Oil 101" explanation to share with people who say "yeah, yeah, how many times have we heard that the sky is falling?" I work in IT and the Y2K hype is still really fresh in our collective minds - back then, we entertained ourselves by reading the "prepare for the end of the world" magazines on our breaks. My favourite Y2K ad featured an underground shelter on one page, and a year's supply of canned beans on the other: it never struck me as a great idea to squish several people into a bomb shelter and then feed them beans!

Now, you'd recommend a garden full of beans and potatoes and kale and carrots, and a house full of people. Okay, a stash of Beano just in case is probably not out of the question, but still, I like your idea of 'being preapred' better than bomb shelters and MREs.

Thank you for all your (eminently *practical*) encouragement and insight. :)

Good post. It reminds me that much of the public does not understand that any scientific idea, even if it is a good one like gravity, is only quite probable, never completely certain. Many think that talking about "probable" outcomes is a sign of the weakness of the argument, rather than what it really is--an indicator of intellectual honesty.

I was a geology major in the 70's (although not on a petroleum geology track and currently work in health care) and remember a professor saying when you look at the geologic record we are due for another ice age as well as a flip in the magnetic poles.

I think people forgot this fact about geologic predictions: when a geologist says we are due for something, their time scales are so huge, what they mean by tomorrow could be thousands of years from now.

Also the amount of fossil fuels burned in the intervening 30 plus years has so greatly added to the anthropogenic heating of the atmosphere it throws the whole model out of whack...therefore making those predictions invalid (although if the polar ice caps all melt and stop the thermohaline currents, maybe some cooling could result..who knows!)

Sedimentary geologists are now finding that there is significantly increased deposition rates of limestone in tropical waters due to increased CO2 content of our oceans. Unfortunately this increase is nowhere near enough to offset what we keep releasing. sigh.

So much to think about. I think unrealized Y2K fears (such silliness, in retrospect), really hurt the possibility of people taking threats of future catastrophes seriously. More importantly, none of us can know the absolute truth- the whens, whys, and hows of how Peak Oil/Global warming are going to sugar out. We educate ourselves as best we can, obtain all the information possible, but in the end, as I find myself saying more and more to Peak Oil/Global Warming skeptics, "I guess time will tell."

I divide the thinkers of this planet into two groups: those who have opinions about matters they could not possibly have enough knowledge of and those who are honest enough to say "I do not actually know".

Peak oil and Blame-the-Humans-for Global-Warming cancel each other out, don't they? If oil peaks, human CO2goes down (not that it causes warming anyway, but they claim it does).

None of the believers in either debate can prove their case. There is unending evidence for both sides of both of these debates. Therefore there is unending debate, sort of like the neo-cons "warron tare" - unending.

I am convinced humans just love to fight and are lying when they claim to be anti-war. Like most mammals, the males pick fights and the females mate with the winners. There is nothing humans love more than a debate about a subject so vast that none of them could possibly know the answer. They will scream about the origins of all of life and pass laws to force their neighbor's children into schools to be brainwashed with their views. They will pretend they know the entire climate of the earth, know what its history is, know which scientists to take seriously on the matter, know which government bureacrats are making the right policies to control it all, and know exactly what God thinks about your sexual desires.

Humans, in short, are a bunch of lying, bluffing, sadistic bullies who will say anything if it will torment their neighbors and start a fight. I am leaving this planet - in spite of its wonderful scenery and pretty women - as soon as the mother ship returns.

Anonymous,I agree that whatever ensues could be much worse than anyone imagines and turn into a Mad Max type scenario. I hope not, but be prepared as you can!

I just recently found this blog and really like reading everyone's deep thoughts and opinions. Sharon, your posts are so timely and well-written and give me much food for thought.

Just a few comments about the 1970's - I was a young mother at the time with 2 daughters that kept me hopping. I did read the newspaper every day, watched the nightly news and followed what was going on in the world. I remember the oil shocks quite well, but don't recall anyone ever saying we were running out of oil. We were very frugal anyway as a way of life - learned that at the knee of my dear grandmother who taught me everything. She raised 8 children during the dust bowl & Depression and WWII. That experience galvanized her into the strongest woman I ever knew and she never changed her ways the rest of her life. My grandma was my role model and I loved her dearly!

Back to the 70's! My husband and I had moved to the city after marrying for better wages. After the daughters were born we moved to the country as we did not want to raise our daughters in the city. Best move we ever made! We loved it - I was the quintessential "Earth Mother", baked all our bread, gardened, canned everything I could, made all the clothing for my daughters and myself (except our jeans of course!), I quilted with a group of quilters, learned to knit from my neighbor and LOVED my life. We even raised pigs! We had very little money, but we didn't need a lot. These were very happy years for us even though we didn't have much money!

After the girls were grown, we moved back to the city, I went to work, we had more "stuff" and bought it instead of making it. The marriage slowly deteriorated and we finally divorced. I'm now married again and very happy - living in the country again! We bought a small farm of 40 acres - originally intended just to go there on weekends, but next thing you know we both lost our jobs in the 90's and were forced to sell our house in the city and moved to the farm. The old farmhouse had been abandoned many years before, but we decided to renovate it and live in it. Whew! Spent the money from our previous house gutting this one and totally re-doing it. We lived on my unemployment check for months - we had no running water, no heat except a little gas heater but we did have electricity. The unemployment check did not go very far, so we learned to live on next to nothing. We moved into this house in January when it was -18 degrees! After a couple of days of that, we made an investment in a wood stove - and lived like kings! It was a very rough year or so, but we were stronger for it. Our little farmhouse is cozy and nice now and PAID for!

I only tell you this story so you know that no matter how bad things get sometimes, you can find a way to make it! We have a garden again, fruit trees, our woodstove, 8 cats and plan on raising beef and chickens after my husband retires. We will survive, but it's Mother Earth I worry about, not us.

I have always been a tree-hugger and very ecologically conscious, and it breaks my heart to see so many people so detached from nature they don't see Mother Earth being trashed, our atmosphere filling with more greenhouse gasses daily, the folly of it all with resources being depleted, and species going extinct. At least the poor honey-bee made the news, but people just shrug and go on with their lives and forget it. I do despair for humanity - and for what kind of lives my grandchildren will have to bear.

18 Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope: 19 That say, Let him make speed, and hasten his work, that we may see it: and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it! 20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

This has been a very interesting read. Thank you as always for your insightful text. The burning question I have is this: if there was the means to do so, would you recommend packing up and moving to the country or staying put in suburbia?

Anonymous,I can't answer your question as to whether packing up and moving to the country or staying put in suburbia is the best thing to do. For me, there was no doubt I wanted to live in the country again. It's just a thing about having space around me, but yet having some good neighbors a mile or two away. You would want to think carefully about what you need to get by and if that is more apt to happen in the country or the city. We stock up on basic food supplies - flour, sugar, beans, rice, coffee and stuff on that order as it's 6 miles to the nearest grocery store. We grow a lot of veggies in the summer and this year plan on buying heritage open-pollinated type veggies so we can save our seeds - can't do that with hybrids.

One huge advantage of the country, I love going outside at night and looking up at the millions of stars - it's wonderful! That is a genuine pleasure you can't get in the cities or suburbs because of light pollution. In the country, another thing to think about is the availability of water, the condition of the septic tank, an alternate heat source (oftentimes unavailable in the city), other people near enough that you can all look out for one another, and a good, tight dwelling or one that you can at least make good & tight without a huge expense.

I think you will have to be very resourceful and know how to take care of yourself & your family no matter which way you go. If things go bad because of food shortages etc., you can't expect overwhelmed authorities to feed everyone - I'm afraid Katrina-like responses would be the norm rather than the exception. Food cooperatives will be a necessity for sharing food. Think of the elderly that wouldn't be able to obtain enough food on their own! We may all go back to the days when the younger folks in the family take in the elders to care for them. For the elders that have no one, neighbors will need to help them. That is probably a niche calling all of us could keep in mind as part of our future.

Not much help there, but I always have a lot of thoughts spinning around in my head! Good luck with your decision.

As to the notion mentioned in some of the comments here that we just don't know whether oil is peaking or not: Peak Oil is not a theory. Oil will peak (or already has). What is a theory is all those new sources of oil and energy we are going to find to offset the decline in energy resources we are experiencing right now as we live and breathe.

The reason people dismiss the notion of Peak Oil is that its implications are just too hard to accept. Most people could better receive the news that there is proof positive proof that there is no God, that their spouse was cheating on them, or that they had terminal cancer than they can accept the consequences of Peak Oil.

If fuel prices continue to rise at the rate they are rising now (due to demand outstripping possible production), there will soon be no 3000 sq ft house in suburbia, no job to commute 40 miles to get to, no Marts full of cheap goods from China. The thing you sold your soul and hocked your future to study in college will be useless, investments, 401k's, pensions, etc will all be unreliable.

People will literally have to reinvent their lives. Scary thing to face. And that's why it is so comfortable to dismiss Peak Oil than to seriously learn about it.

John Howard said: "Peak oil and Blame-the-Humans-for Global-Warming cancel each other out, don't they? If oil peaks, human CO2 goes down (not that it causes warming anyway, but they claim it does)."

John, they don't cancel each other out instantly. Peak oil doesn't mean emission reduction to zero, it means a decline or stabilisation of consumption rates, which for some time would be well above rates which would not affect the overall carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere.

Even if we globally reduced our emissions to zero it could take 50 or more years for the global temperature to peak (yes, there's a lag in there).

There's no shortage of scientific research which refutes the "not that it causes warming anyway" nonsense.

I guess that throw-away comment of yours puts you in the "those who have opinions about matters they could not possibly have enough knowledge" camp, then.

I think you’ve made an error in describing Peak Oil. Peak Oil has been reached once the maximum amount produced has been achieved, and then production has then gone into an irreversible decline. On a month by month basis, for crude and condensate (C&C) this happened in 2005. For all liquids, what appeared to be a peak was set in 2006 only to be overtaken in late 2007. On an annualised basis C&C peaked in 2005 and I believe the 2006 all liquids peak still remains.

Peak Oil is about decline (in production) and not about depletion. When a field or region has peaked it may or may not be at 50% depletion. While depletion is important when considering future oil availability, what counts for us today is decline. If the world produces 75mbpd C&C and consumes 72mbpd, then alls well (in one sense at least). If the opposite case is true, then problems are going to develop as there’s simply not enough C&C to meet demand. This means somebody on planet Earth is going to have to make do with less, and all manner of geopolitical jiggery pokery will take place to secure oil supplies, and so on. I think we can safely say we’re already seeing this happening.

There’s another interesting twist in the story, especially for oil importers. Many exporting countries are experiencing increased internal consumption. Of course, as domestic consumption rises exports may very well be reduced. For importers this may bring the effects of a peak in production far sooner than peak itself. How this competition between exporter’s domestic demand versus importer’s demand plays out remains to be seen, and it will be interesting.

Exactly. Peak Oi! can be thought of as a bunch of kids, each armed with a straw, all trying to drink the same milkshake. Eventually, no more heads will fit around the cup within straw range, and as the level of fluid goes down some straws start sucking air.

The export land model is explained very well in this article:http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2767#moreThe discussion in the comments section afterwards is pretty good, too. Only one smelly troll. :)

4.55 billion years ago, the Earth was formed. At that time the solar luminance was 70% of what it is today. During the interveining years, the Earth has maintained a very good temperature for life being approximately +/- 10 degrees C of what the temperature is today,about 14 degrees C.

If one thinks in intergalactic terms, this is relatively stable.

In order to achieve this stability, the Earth's atmosphere would have had to have been 100% CO2 in those early days. However, since oxygen based photosynthesis wasn't yet invented by cianobacteria and since there was no atmospheric oxygen until 2.2 billion years ago, there was also no atmospheric ozone and therefore methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, was probably plentiful. So relative temperature stability was achieved.

So we can assume the Earth always had a realtively balmy climate even during those 4 or 6 snowball Earth episodes (2000, 750 and 650 million years ago approximately).

Now this may all sound silly, but I suspect that if the Earth were to experience an increase in temperature of 1 to 5 degrees C, as is being estimated by the AGW theory, life would continue to do quite well on Earth.

The problem is that the temperature increase being caused as it is by human emissions of fossil fuels at a rate roughly equivalent to 8,000,000 years worth of carbon sequestration every single year is simply too fast for existing life, including humans.

I would like to tie this togther with two other seemingly disparate data.

Mathias Wackernagel in PNAS, 2002 estimated that humans were consuming 120% of net primary productivity. Suffice to say this means we are already in biological overshoot at 6.6 billion humans.

AGW and peak oil are exacerbated by other environmental stresses we humans are causing and experiencing such as mountaintop removal mining, strip mining tar in Alberta, nuclear waste generation which will never be properly cleaned up, overfishing oceans and so on.

I will go on a limb to suggest that the Earth's carrying capacity for humanity is between 1 and 4 billion people. This implies that in the 70's, we actually had a good chance of surviving without loss of life had we heeded TLTG and other sage advice. In other words, as you point out, the Meadow's predictions were not premature at all. The 70's were indeed the time to proactively address peak oil and global warming.

Now that we are 6.6 billion, there may be no comfortable way to get the population down to a more sustainable 4 billion.

Outside of the relatively insulated US, the Earth's population of humans is already suffering the impacts of these calamnities.

You do well to point out that speculation in the 70s of another ice age and the speculation surrounding Y2K were not the same thing at all.

Y2K was a pretty minor computer problem which was readily addressed, hardly AGW or PO.

I wish people talking about peak oil would avoid the "halfway point" bugbear. Peak oil is too complicated for that simple model. There may be several times as much "oil" in tar and shale etc as we've used thus far, but we've used the easy stuff and the rest is hard to get and has much lower energy return on energy invested. The hard stuff can also only be "produced" slowly, and "it's not the size of the tank, it's the size of the tap" that matters when it comes to "supply not meeting demand".

"~Vegan/Leaving So. FL" made the observation that her generation did nothing. I please to take issue. My brother moved to Australia where he confronts issues as a Green Party Activist, he's 5 years younger than me. I'm 60. Yes, many of those who came just after us 1966 HS Grads did little or nothing, I think they went overboard with the drug scene and lost the vision. Who wouldn't dumb down after Kent State and Cointelpro. "Step out of line, the man come, and take you away,"

Sharon,I want to provide some very important back-up for Kansas Kitty. I graduated from college in 1970, and I never once heard of running out of oil until I read Kenneth Deffeyes book about 5 years ago. What we were told at the time was that we needed some oil from the middle east, and that they were mad at us for something, so they weren't sending us enough. Sorry, but everything you ever heard about us "boomers" and our times is wrong. We weren't all hippies. We didn't all drop out. Those who did may still be there out somewhere. They didn't necessarily "convert" to money grubbers. It was not only a very diverse population, it includes people who weren't even there at all. The boomer time period goes from birth years of 1946-1962. Not many people who were born in 1962 were dropping out as hippies in 1968. Have you ever read "How to Lie with Statistics"? The "boomer" history was rewritten with statistical lies to suit someone else's agenda. To come full circle here, just because "everybody" says that "everybody" was concerned about running out of oil in the 1970's doesn't necessarily mean that anyone was.

There are two morals to the story (of 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'). The first is: avoid giving false alarms. The second is: in the end, the wolf came, so do not be misled by previous false alarms into thinking that the latest alarm is false, too.

Of these two morals, the second one is more significant. Believing false alarms wastes time, but can lead to some helpful advice for apprentice shepherds; disbelieving all alarms can lead to a local lad being eaten, for starters.

Aesop might be tempted to revise his fable slightly. Here we have the apprentice shepherd growing mature and experienced in the job. He has been giving precise fixes of the wolf's advance for as long as anyone can remember. He is specific and credible about the action that must be taken to save the village. And still he is disbelieved.

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